Church must admit wrongdoing in Merzbacher cases

My wife grew up in a large Catholic family in Locust Point, and she and her siblings attended Our Lady of Good Counsel School. They have wonderful stories of friends, relatives, co-workers and neighborhood characters, second and third generation descendants of immigrants from Germany, Poland and Ireland, who are the embodiment of American working class families who sacrificed so much to give their children a better life.

In this close community, the stories about John Merzbacher and the atrocities he committed on innocent children began surfacing early on ("Calls for reform in cases of abuse," Nov. 27). Many people who were looked up to by the community were complicit in these horrific acts. Most notably, the Archdiocese of Baltimore knowingly covered up these heinous crimes on innocent children in their charge, and then offered counseling as compensation.

There is no compensation for the lifetime of suffering that these people have endured, other than for the archdiocese to admit their guilt in these crimes imposed upon families who loved and trusted their church, whose dreams for their children were crushed through no fault of their own.